Publisher of Studio Ghibli meets Stardew Valley life sim Spirittea says the failure of Steam's competitors is hitting indie games hard

gamesradar.com:

The publisher of a hit new indie game has explained why failed PC launchers are having a negative impact on new indie games.

Spirittea launched earlier this week across PC and Xbox consoles via Xbox Game Pass, and Nintendo Switch. No More Robots was responsible for publishing the new cozy farming sim, and the head of the publisher, Mike Rose, has delved into why the failure of new PC launchers that try to rival Steam has actually ended up hurting indie games as a result.

Rose explains all in the tweet thread just below. Usually, indie games would have Steam be their most successful platform at launch, with other console platforms catching up later on. This wasn't the case for Spirittea, though, because 80% of its revenue came from both Xbox consoles and Nintendo Switch, meaning merely 20% of its revenue came from Steam.

It's time for another classic Mike Rose stats tweet thread!!This time it's ☕**Spirittea launch week stats!**☕We launched Spirittea last Monday, and it's been one of our biggest launches to date: pic.twitter.com/KPI4UNrcWbNovember 20, 2023

Rose thinks this is because "way more" AAA publishers have started putting their games on Steam, having failed to make Steam competitors on PC succeed. Take Activision, for example, which recently switched to putting its Call of Duty games back on Steam over the past few years, taking them away from launching exclusively on Battle.net. Epic Games has recently discussed how its own launcher is still failing to turn a profit, and as those launchers roll back some of their ambitions those games are returning to Steam.

As Rose explains, that means "more eyeballs on the bigger releases, and less for the smaller releases," as Steam draws in more AAA releases over the year.